A ground-breaking discovery announced this week by a team including a Stanford physicist provides the first direct evidence supporting a theory — posited decades ago by another Stanford physicist — of how the universe was created.

So the Stanford team member, Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo, made a surprise visit to the older man's home to bring him champagne and the good news.

"This is something I have been hoping to see for 30 years," said Professor Andrei Linde, 66. He was working in Moscow in the 1980s when he came up with his theory of cosmic inflation to explain the start of the universe in the moments following the Big Bang.

At the South Pole, Kuo and the other researchers of the BICEP2 collaboration used a telescope to observe "the cosmic microwave background - a faint glow left over from the Big Bang," said the Stanford News Service. The observations closely matched the predictions of Linde's model.